"New" ID research announced

Access Research Network (ARN) maintain a blog related to "ID-related" literature. The site has amassed a total of nine posts since October 2004, thus proving that the ID perspective can prompt a veritable torrent of papers. Their latest posting is, believe it or not, a notice of Well's Rivista paper from a year ago. Yup, those IDers sure keep up with their own literature. The notice, by the way, contains a link to a PDF of the paper if you haven't seen it before. Below the fold I give some reactions to the piece and Wells' research.

In the past, I have made the claim in public talks that ID could theoretically (and I stress theoretically) turn itself into a valid scientific endevour. At The ID Report, Denyse O'Leary (journalist, post-Darwinist, and fan of the fun boys at Telic Thoughts) feels that ID is already there. Writing of Well's Rivista di Biologia paper, she notes:

Wells makes clear in the paper that his assumptions are based on the thesis that the centriole is a designed object, like a machine, and should be studied as one.

Wells is claiming that the centriole is designed to be a turbine (though interestingly he is unsure if it is irreducibly complex). From this, he claims that "a microtubule-mediated ejection force" is generated which is regulated by intracellular calcium. Fair enough. So what are the predictions of Wells' hypothesis?

1. It predicts that spindle microtubules in animal cells begin to oscillate at the beginning of prometaphase, and that those oscillations rapidly accelerate until metaphase, at which point they decelerate or cease. By metaphase the oscillations may be of such high frequency that they would be difficult to detect, but the lower frequency oscillations early in prometaphase should be detectable by immunofluorescence microscopy and high-speed camera technology.
2. It predicts that the centriole contains a helical pump powered by dynein molecules located in the inner wall of its lumen. Improved imaging techniques may make it possible to elucidate the complex internal structure of centrioles, characterizing more fully the helical structures in their lumens and determining the precise localization of dynein in their inner walls.
3. It predicts that the polar ejection force is regulated, at least in part, by intracellular calcium concentration. It should be possible to test this by observing chromosome behavior in the spindles of dividing animal cells while artificially raising the concentration of intracellular calcium during prometaphase or blocking its rise at the beginning of anaphase.

In the past, I've made the following points as advice to ID supporters:

If ID has something to say about biological evolution, do biological research - not literature surveys, statistical simulations, thought experiments, etc. Generate testable hypotheses that come from the design perspective. Make sure these hypotheses can differentiate between evolutionary and design predictions. Test them using observation or experiment. Rinse. Repeat.

Wells' theory certainly comes from the "design perspective," but it does not in itself offer any support for that perspective. I don't see how Wells' hypothesis (centrioles as generators of calcium-medicated ejection forces) even if it is demonstrated by testing the above claims, can distinguish between evolutionary and design explainations. Wells' work is currently an untested hypothesis. Even if we are unable to falsify it following multiple experimental or observational tests, it does not (as currently formulated) explicitly differentiate between design and naturalistic predictions; just because Wells assumed the centriole was designed, and this allowed him to make a testable hypothesis, does not mean that the centriole was designed, nor does it demonstrate that a naturalistic origin for the centriole is impossible.

Over at SciAm Perspectives John Rennie offers the following points on Wells' paper:

Even if the centrioles do turn out to generate a turbine force, that doesn't indicate they were designed to that end. All it proves is that centrioles act like little turbines. Unless they can establish that centrioles couldn't have evolved to function as turbines, they haven't done anything to validate ID. It's Michael Behe's wrongheaded argument all over again: the flagellum on a bacterium may look and act like a little propeller, but that doesn't mean it was designed for that purpose.

There's no particular reason for ID to inspire the hypothesis that centrioles are turbines. Wells pulled that idea out of thin air because they look like turbines to him. There's a world of difference between (a) developing hypotheses that logically derive from a working theory and (b) inventing hypotheses that could be commensurate with your theory but aren't extensions of it. Looking at it the other way, if centrioles didn't function as turbines, would that in any way shake Wells's confidence in ID?

Two excellent points that the IDists still have to refute.

At the BIOLA 2004 conference, Wells had the following to say:

"First of all, ID encourages a closer look at centrosomes and centrioles. They are not very interesting from a Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, in fact they are totally uninteresting. I have submitted this paper ... to several journals. The first one, the editor was a strong evolutionary biologist, and his reaction was 'well, we are not interested in theories of centrosomal function, we just want more molecules, you should just go out and give us those.' This is the molecular reductionist emphasis that I attribute to Darwinian evolution. ID liberates us from that first of all. It encourages us to take cell structures or living structures at face value. I mean, this thing looks for all the world like a turbine, it's been called a turbine for decades by cell biologists, but nobody - and I've searched the literature - nobody has proposed that it's a turbine before. I think it might be, you know. It's worth a shot. ID in a broader sense encourages this sort of cellular perspective, organismal perspective, as opposed to the bottom-up molecular perspective, but the most specific instance in this case is the turbine idea. Well, I would say the Archimedes Screw too - it looks like a screw, maybe it is a screw. ... maybe it is a vortexer, and it turns out the effect would be similar to what we have observed in cells for decades. So, ID encourages one to trust your intuition, to make the leap. You know, if it looks like this, maybe it is, let's look in to it. Maybe it fits, maybe it doesn't, but it's worth a shot. And so it's not that ID says 'Yes, this is where it is, you have to find it here' - ID is more of an umbrella, a framework, that encourages this sort of risky hypothesis making that I think could ultimately be very fruitful"

Yes, I know. Some of you will have seen this before. But if ARN can recycle, so can I :)